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“This book sheds new light on an important but neglected aspect of Anatolian history in the Mongol period. By focusing on literary production in a dedicated region, northwest Anatolia, this book makes a significant contribution both to medieval Anatolian and to Persian literary cultural studies, bringing to light sources neglected by existing scholarship and showing the value of focused regional research both for literary and political history more broadly.” Andrew Peacock, University of St Andrews, Scotland
The Chobanids of Kastamonu
This book provides a novel approach to the history of medieval Anatolia by analysing political, religious and cultural developments in the region of Kastamonu during the reign of the Chobanid dynasty (c. 1211-1309).
During the 13th century, the Chobanids consolidated a local dynasty in western Anatolia — a borderland between Islam and Christianity — becoming cultural actors patronising the production of religious, scientific and administrative works in the Persian language. These works, though surviving today in manuscript form, have received little attention in modern historiography. The book therefore attends to this gap in the research, incorporating a detailed study of texts by little-known authors from the time. The book explores the relationship between Islam and the Chobanid dynasty in the context of the wider process of Islamisation in medieval Anatolia, hypothesising that Turkmen dynasties played a fundamental role in this process of Islamisation and acculturation. The Chobanids of Kastamonu, then, offers an in-depth study of a Turkmen local dynasty that achieved political autonomy, financial independence and cultural patronage in medieval Anatolia vis-a-vis the main political powers of the time.
Attentive to religious diversity, state formation and processes of transculturation in medieval Anatolia, the book is key reading for scholars of Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies.
Bruno De Nicola is Research Associate at the Institute of Iranian Studies in the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna). His main areas of research are the cultural history of medieval and early modern Eurasia, the Mongol Empire and the study of Islamic manuscripts.
Acknowledgements
This book is the consequence of a series of fortunate accidents. Technically, it began to be written over seven years ago when I started work for the ISLAMANATOLIA project at the University of St Andrews. During my initial months in the job I came accros an anonymous manuscript described in the catalogue of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France as a ‘traité sur les sectes hétérodoxes de l’Islam, par un auteur inconnu, qui l’a dédié 4 un grand émir, nommé Mouzaffer ed-Din Mas‘oud ibn Albark’.! It was the first time that the name of this local Turkmen ruler of Kastamonu came to my attention. The text sounded fascinating, I ordered a copy from the BNF and my research on the text resulted in a research article. That could have been the end of my relationship with the region of Kastamonu were it not for Professor Andrew Peacock, who told me, over tea at a cafe in Beyoglu, about the existence of other manuscripts composed for this amir in the 13th century. That conversation was the starting point for this book and set me on a quest to reconstruct and examine the history of Chobanid Kastamonu from the surviving literary corpus produced in this region.
My deepest gratitude goes, therefore, to Andrew Peacock, who not only pointed me in the direction of writing this book but has been the key person helping me in my academic and professional development since I joined him as a postdoctoral researcher on his project back in 2013. He deserves a great deal of credit because he accompanied the research and writing process of these chapters by always making useful comments, suggestions and remarks that have clearly improved the outcome of this project. I am grateful for the support, knowledge and guidance provided throughout the years and I am glad that mutual academic collaboration has continued after the conclusion of the project. I would also like to express my gratitude to Sara Nur Yildiz and Zeynep Oktay, my fellow postdoctoral researchers on the ISLAMANATOLIA project, for their constant support and help during all those years visiting the great city of Istanbul. It has been an enjoyable and enriching experience working with all of them.
Other friends and colleagues have also played a crucial role in helping me during the research and writing of this book. I am grateful to Professor Scott Redford for his generosity and support especially during my many visits to Istanbul during the preparation of this research. I would like to thank especially Shervin Farridnejad and Mohsen Husseini for their help in reading some Persian passages. My appreciation goes also to Oya Pancaroglu, Iklil Selcuk and Niko Kontovas for their help with navigating and accessing Turkish sources. Eekaterini Mitsiou and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller have also been very helpful in introducing me to Byzantine sources that were new to me. I would like to express special gratitude to Alexey Khismatulin, who took the time to read parts of this book and made some very useful observations. I am also thankful to Isla Rosser-Owen and Allison McKechnie for proofreading and copy-editing the final version of this book. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Carole Hillenbrand for agreeing to publish this book as part of her book series at Routledge.
The book would also not have been possible without the financial support of various projects and institutions. Primarily, the research received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007—2013) / ERC Grant Agreement No. 208476, ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100-1500’. In addition, I would like to acknowledge other institutions that, in one way or another, have helped me in different stages of this project. Special thanks to the School of History at the University of St Andrews and my colleagues in the Middle East studies section. Further, my thanks to research and educational institutions based in Turkey such as ANAMED (Kog University) and the Orient-Institut in Istanbul. My gratitude also goes to the Siileymaniye Library and the Tiirkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Baskanligi for allowing me to work with manuscripts while doing research in Turkey. Unfortunately, this last institution has denied permission for publication of some manuscript images for this book without providing the author an explanation for the denial. It is for this reason that, unfortunately, no images of manuscripts held in Turkish collections have been reproduced in this book. At the same time, I am deeply grateful to other institutions that has facilitated images and permissions for this publication. My thanks to the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Bibliotheque Nationale de France and three Iranian libraries: the National Library of Iran, the Malek Library and Museum and the Majlis Library.
More recently, I have also received support from different colleagues at the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My special thanks to director Dr Florian Schwarz and all the staff of the Institute for creating a fascinating intellectual environment for my current research. The final stages of this research were also possible thanks to the support provided by the NoMansLand project (START prize: Y 1232 G30) financed by Der Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF, Austria). This book is also being published in memoriam of Professor Bert Fragner (1941-2021).
Finally, to my family, my son Marco, my daughter Lara and my wife Marta, my most sincere gratitude for their unconditional support during the preparation of this book.
Note on transliteration
The transliteration style in this book has been done using the JJMES Unternational Journal of Middle Eastern Studies) guidelines for transliterating Arabic, Persian and Turkish. We have followed this style using diacritical marks and italics to reflect Arabic or Persian words and phrases using Latin script in cases of technical terms and direct quotes from a text. Diacritics and special characters are not included on proper nouns (names of places, people, organisations), titles of works, or terms that are now in such common usage that they are found in one of the standard English dictionaries. The exception to the no-diacritics rule are that the ayn and hamza markers were retained in order to avoid confusion with single quote marks. Where a standard ‘English’ version exists for a name, place or term, that spelling was generally used. Likewise, we have standardised use of Chobanid as opposed to Cobanoglu or other form of the name. As a rule, I have followed [/MES in terms of which diacritical marks are used and how vowels are reflected.
The full ISMES transliteration guidelines can be accessed in the following link: www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-stud ies/information/author-resources/ijmes-translation-and-transliteration-guide.
Introduction
In 1996 the British historian Clifford E. Bosworth published a reference book that offers a chronology of Islamic dynasties which updated a previous work published by him in 1967.' Omitted in the first version of the work, the new edition listed among an extensive enumeration of Islamic dynasties the Choban Oghullaré at number 123. The entry only includes a chronology of four rulers followed by a short text describing the campaign of the Turkmen Anatolian lord ‘Husam al-Din Chobar’ to Crimea in 1223. To my knowledge, this is the first specific reference to the Chobanids of Kastamonu in the English language in a major European publication acknowledging these Turkmen rulers as members of an Islamic dynasty. Although some general works on the history of Anatolia have made passing references to the Chobanids of Kastamonu, Western scholars have remained mostly unaware of (or uninterested in) this peripheral Turkmen dynasty.
The history of medieval Anatolia has attracted increasing attention in the last few decades. Scholars based in institutions across Europe, the United States and Turkey have been revisiting more traditional paradigms developed by scholars such as K6priilii and others during the 20th century. This new approach to the history of the Anatolian Peninsula in the period between the 12th and the 14th centuries is more in tune with the advice given by the French historian Claude Cahen some decades ago:
It is therefore important to study Asia Minor for itself, and only to allow the Ottoman point of view to be brought in step by step with the effective development of Ottoman influence in its history. That Asia Minor should be taken into account when studying the origins of the Ottoman Empire may, again with the appropriate precautions, be legitimate; but it does not follow that Asia Minor has to be studied as an introduction to the Ottoman Empire.”
This new approach to the history of Asia Minor in the centuries prior to the consolidation of the Ottoman dynasty in the Anatolian peninsula helped modern scholarship to break away from seeing this period as a mere precedent to the rise of the Ottomans, and to consider it a historical period in its own right. A re-evaluation of the period’s historiography, archaeology and material culture has opened a new perspective on aspects of the political, economic and cultural history of the period. Our knowledge of the literary history of medieval Anatolia has increased dramatically in the last couple of decades. The publication and translation of the main historical chronicles of the period has provided a general narrative of the political history of the Seljuqs of Rum and their relationship with the Mongols of Iran (Ilkhanate) in the region after their conquest of Anatolia in the 1240s. Similarly, recent studies on manuscript production in medieval Anatolia have proven invaluable in understanding the region as a centre for the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge in the period. However, the picture we have of the political and cultural history of Anatolia is not homogeneous across the territory, and our knowledge of the historical development of the peninsula, especially in the 13th century, is rather unbalanced. While our understanding of the cultural and intellectual history of central and eastern Anatolia is advancing rapidly, the western and northern parts of the peninsula have received more modest attention from the scholarly world.
In this context, this book aims to contribute to the history of medieval Anatolia by looking at the developments of the region of Kastamonu under the reign of the Chobanid dynasty (r. 1210-1309). This work explores different aspects of the cultural history of the period while keeping two main objectives in mind. First, this study wants to explore the relationship developed between this peripheral Turkmen dynasty of north-western Kastamonu vis-a-vis the main political powers of the time (Byzantium, the Seljuqs of Rum, the Mongol Ilkhanate of Iran and the Golden Horde) and how it was integrated into the cultural and religious transformation that occurred in 13th-century Anatolia. We aim to explore whether an in-depth study of a peripheral dynasty such as the Chobanids of Kastamonu could serve as a useful case study to discuss mechanisms of state formation, dynamics of centrality and the periphery in Islamic empires and processes of Islamisation, transculturation and production of knowledge, that can be connected to the general context of the history of the Middle East. Second, this study is, to some extent, a methodological experiment that tries to confront the general tendency in Middle Eastern Studies that makes (ab)use of historical chronicles and narratives for the reconstruction of the past. As an attempt to challenge this tendency, this study aims to show that in the medieval Islamic world, our knowledge of the cultural history of a given time and place can be expanded by paying special attention to the literary works produced in this moment, even if they were not conceived as historical narratives.
Despite the increase of scholarly interest in medieval Anatolia in recent decades, certain aspects of the history of this period remain poorly understood. Among them is the functioning of the centre—periphery dynamics present in the Turco-Mongol states of medieval Eurasia. We know little about how the Seljuqs of Rum controlled the territory under their sway and how different regions and populations across the peninsula interacted with the central court in Konya. How did the different Turkmen groups such as the Chobanids of Kastamonu, being both subjects of and rivals to the Seljuqs in different periods, interact with the sultanate court? How intertwined were they as representations of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, not only in terms of political domination and rebellion but also in terms of the cultural and religious transformation that was occurring in the region? Similar questions can be extrapolated into a larger historiographical context that includes the ways in which the Mongols ruled Iran and how Mongol rule was exercised once the Ilkhanate took control of Anatolia in the mid-13th century. From the point of view of the IIkhanate, Anatolia became yet another territory ruled by a subject dynasty that acknowledged Ilkhanid overlordship but maintained different degrees of political, cultural and religious autonomy. Southern areas of the Ilkhanate such as Fars or Kerman were also ruled in this period by Turkic dynasties such as the Salghurids or the Qutlughkhanids respectively, but maintained a close political, cultural and dynastic interaction with the Mongol court.* In comparison, the Seljuqs of Rum had their own particularities with regard to their institutions, political organisation and cultural background, but were similarly confronted with the shifting of gravitational power from Anatolia into the IIkhanate. The study of the manifestations of these realities circumscribed to the region of Kastamonu offers the opportunity to explore the dynamics of peripheral power structures in a complex multi-layered system of political domination, and religious and cultural transformation in medieval Anatolia that can serve as a departure point for future in-depth studies of the regional history of the period.
The main period of enquiry of the book begins in the 13th century, when the Seljuqs, led by Rukn al-Din Sulayman IJ (r. 1197-1204), finally defeated the Saltuqids at Erzurum and forced Armenian Cilicia into vassalage. His reign inaugurates the pinnacle of the political, military and cultural development of the Seljuq sultanate of Rum that was characterised by the expansion of religious foundations, patronage of the arts and scholars, and the institutional development of the court. In parallel, a closer control of the border was implemented by assigning specific titles and privileges to some Turkmen rulers that possibly already controlled regions of western Anatolia. Among them was Husam al-Din Choban, who, according to the historian Ibn Bibi, received in 1211-12 the title of amir and was acknowledged as ruler of Kastamonu in north-western Anatolia. Mostly incorporated into the Seljuq political structure for the military capability of his tribesmen, the descendants of Husam al-Din would consolidate a local dynasty in north-western Anatolia that would endure into the first decade of the 14th century. In the course of the 13th century, the Chobanids (in Turkish, Cobanoglu) managed to survive the Mongol invasions of Anatolia in the 1240s that diminished Seljuq power in the region by accommodating to the changing political dynamics of this border region. However, in the context of Mongol-dominated Anatolia, the Chobanid rulers did not content themselves with surviving constant political turmoil, but went one step further into commissioning literary works, financing architectural projects and promoting the spread of Islam in their territories.
The sources
Many local dynasties across the Middle East exerted patronage and financed literary works in the 13th century, so the Chobanid dynasty of Kastamonu is hardly unusual in this respect. However, it is a particularly unusual case in that a relatively large number of the literary works connected to this peripheral dynasty (dedicated to the rulers or composed in the region during their reign) have survived to our day in various manuscripts that receive little or no attention at all in modern historiography.* This offers a particularly interesting corpus of works ranging in topics from astronomy, administrative literature and religious accounts to manuals of letter-writing that offer a substantial amount of alternative information to the more standard historical narratives available for the period. In addition, while this book makes extensive use of this literary corpus, it does not disregard some of the main historical sources of the period. Because Kastamonu was a border zone between Islam and Christianity in the 13th century, references to the region can be found in sources from different origins.» Historical accounts produced in Islamic Anatolia, Byzantium, the Ilkhanate and the Arab world make occasional and sporadic mentions of the history of Kastamonu. Although information is not abundant with regard to Kastamonu in any of these accounts, their infrequent references help to better contextualise some of the political events occurring in the region. More abundant — albeit far from comprehensive — information on Chobanid Kastamonu can be found in a group of local chronicles composed in Anatolia during the 13th and early 14th centuries that have traditionally been the core of the historical research on medieval Anatolia.®
Among this group of sources are the local chronicles composed in Persian by Ibn Bibi (d. after 1285), Aqsara’i and the chronicle of the Anonymous Historian(s) of Konya.’ The references to the Chobanids in these accounts vary according to the period in which they were composed and the political circumstances in which the authors found themselves at the time of writing. Ibn Bibi, for example, provides vivid accounts of the different military campaigns in which Husam al-Din, the founder of the Chobanid dynasty, participated. However, for the most part, his account fails to provide any meaningful information on the events occurring in the region after Husam al-Din returned victorious to his homeland after his campaign in Crimea. Ibn Bibi only returns to mention Chobanid rulers in the context of the intervention of Muzaffar al-Din b. Alp Yiirek (r. 1280-91), grandson of Husam al-Din, to assist the future Sultan Mas‘ud II (d. 1308) against his brother and rival to the Seljuq throne, Rukn al-Din Kilig Arslan.’ While Ibn Bibi provides details of the early Chobanid rulers, the remaining local chronicles are useful for the events occurring in the second half of the 13th century. Overall, this group of sources is useful for gaining a perspective of how Kastamonu was seen from the Seljuq court and the role that the Chobanids played in the larger political scenario of the peninsula. However, they only provide general accounts, mostly concerned with military campaigns, political alliances and rebellions against the central power, while offering very limited information on any aspect of the economic, social, or cultural life of 13th-century Kastamonu.
Because of the territorial proximity between Kastamonu and the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century one would expect that Greek sources would be particularly interested in the events taking place in the region across their borders.’ There are, for example, specific mentions to the town of Kastamonu in some narrative Greek sources, such as the letter by the priest Niketas Karantinos (fl. 13th century).!° However, Byzantine scholars have noticed that despite the long tradition of historical writing existing in the Byzantine Empire, only three main chronicles of Greek origin actually deal with the different Turkish groups that occupied Anatolia in the 13th and 14th centuries. The earliest of these accounts is the work of George Akropolites (d. 1282), a Nicaean nobleman who wrote a historical account of his time, but interrupted his narrative in the year 1261.'! Because of his origin, his main focus is the events concerning the history of the Empire of Nicaea (r. 1204-61), but he makes specific references to developments in the Seljuq court and the advance of the Mongols in the 1240s. In this context, this account specifically mentions Kastamonu during the 1250s, a particularly obscure period in the history of the region.
George Pachymeres (d. 1310) was a disciple of Akropolites and had a successful ecclesiastical career in Constantinople.'* His Historical Relations is possibly the most relevant historical work on Islamic Anatolia produced in Byzantium.” This account, “despite its difficult rhetorical style and tortuous syntax, is one of the most reliable sources for Byzantine-Turkish relations’.'4 Pachymeres’ history provides a unique description of the final decades of Chobanid rule in Kastamonu and is an important source — despite some confusing passages and a chaotic chronology of events — to reconstruct aspects of the revolt that precipitated the decline of the Chobanids.'* Nicephoros Gregoras (d. 1360) is a later author writing in the early 14th century, but whose work deals mostly with events in Byzantium during the 13th century and the early decades of the 14th century.'* He relies largely on both Akropolites and Pachymeres but offers some complementary accounts based on the use of contemporary sources, providing, for example, some alternative views on the last years of the Chobanids that add to Pachymeres’ account.
In addition to contemporary Greek and Anatolian-Persian sources, there are a number of other sources that, although referring to the region of Kastamonu in passing, offer pivotal information on different aspects of medieval Anatolia. An example of this is the account of the Andalusian historian and geographer Ibn Sa‘id (d. 1286), who passed through Anatolia on his way to Mecca and compiled a geographical account of the peninsula on his return to al-Andalus.!’ Ibn Sa‘id’s description offers some interesting insights into the economic and social life of Anatolia during the early years of the Mongol conquest. He provides a particularly vivid description of the conflicts between Turkmen groups and Christians on the Byzantine frontier and highlights the importance of trade in the economy of different Anatolian cities. This includes the city and area of Kastamonu, where he not only confirms the wide establishment of Turkmen populations in the region, but also provides relevant information on the role of the city as a centre of the slave trade and was connected commercially with the port of Sinop on the Black Sea.!®
A much richer description of the city is provided by Ibn Battuta (d. 1377), another traveller from the Western Islamic world who spent over 40 days in Kastamonu during the 14th century.'? His description of the city, although reflecting aspects of urban life in 14th-century Kastamonu — and consequently post-Chobanid — is useful to establish the existence of certain aspects of the economic and religious life of the city that might have remained in place from the 13th century. It allows us to infer, with caution, the permanence of certain characteristics of the city.?? Although considerably more modest in their description of the city and region, other works by authors for whom we have no record of them visiting Anatolia also mention Kastamonu. Among them, the geographical works of al-‘Umari (d. 1348) and Hamdallah Mustawfi (d. 1349), the latter offering some limited information about the city of Kastamonu during the 14th century.”!
Scattered references to the city of Kastamonu appear also in some hagiographic accounts such as the Manaqib al-‘arifin of Shams al-Din Aflaki, the biographer of Jalal al-Din Rumi.” Although these references are made only in passing, they help us to contextualise some of the original sources composed in Kastamonu that will be at the centre of this research. By making specific references to Sufi shaykhs living in early 14th-century Kastamonu, this hagiography is a good witness, for example, of the evolution of the Islamisation process that occurred in Kastamonu during the 13th century. In the same direction, other scarce but useful documents are the limited number of endowment documents (awgdf) and inscriptions that survive from the period.”* There are no records of coins being minted by the Chobanids of Kastamonu, but the earliest coins known to us date from the third decade of the 14th century made by the Jandarid (Candaroglu) dynasty in the name of the Mongol Ikhan of Iran Abu Sa‘id (r. 1316—35).*4 Although limited in their quantity and scope, these sources offer fundamental information that can, on occasion, serve as a point for validation or refutation of narrative sources. Finally, although general studies on Anatolian architecture often omit references to the region of Kastamonu, the archaeology and material culture of the region offers important information on political, religious and cultural aspects of the city of Kastamonu and its surrounding region.”
Historiography of medieval Kastamonu
Chobanid Kastamonu occupies a marginal place in the historiography of medieval Anatolia, often overshadowed by the later expansion of the successor Jandarid dynasty and their political and military interaction with the early Ottomans. With some honourable exceptions, the majority of the books covering 13th-century Anatolia focus mostly on central and eastern parts of the peninsula while leaving the western frontier out of the analysis or limited to a short, peripheral reference.”° The reason for this is, as we have seen, the limited attention that the Chobanids attracted from the main chroniclers of the period and the difficulty in reconciling their accounts with the Greek sources. In the mid-20th century, Turkish historiography began to explore source material coming from the region in an attempt to incorporate it into the larger context of sources of the Seljuq period. Osman Turan, for example, investigated some of the sources produced in Chobanid Kastamonu as part of a larger study on ‘Official documents’ (Resmi vesikalar) and published in 1953 a pioneering article on the unique manuscript of the work Fustat al-‘adala.”’ These two are the earlier studies on the literary production of the region but containing only limited information on the historical context in which these works were produced. The contribution of Osman Turan in making these texts available and providing some initial interpretations on the material has been pivotal in facilitating research for this current study.
Perhaps prompted by the slow but steady surfacing of sources from the region encouraged by scholars such as Osman Turan, medieval Kastamonu generated a certain amount of debate among Western scholars during the 1970s.*8 This was sparked by the famous French scholar Claude Cahen’s publication of an article dedicated to the history of Kastamonu in the 13th century, in which he argues that the region has been marginalised from the main sources of the period because of its location in a remote place far from the centres of power.” This idea was taken up by Greek scholar Elizabeth Zachariadou who, motivated by Cahen’s statement, tried to find evidence on the region of Kastamonu in Byzantine sources.*? Mostly relying on the above-mentioned chronicle of Pachymeres, Zachariadou discusses the use of some Greek terminology (especially that of amouriou) in trying to shed some light mostly on the final decades of the history of Chobanid Kastamonu. Although her conclusions have been challenged, as we will see, by more recent scholarship in the field, these early contributions helped to visualise the political relevance of 13th-century Kastamonu in the larger Anatolian context and the difficulties that the source material available presents for the study of the region.
A much more comprehensive approach to the history of the region was carried out in the early 1990s by the Turkish historian Yasar Yiicel, who produced a two-volume work dedicated to the study of the different Anatolian beyliks.*! The first of these two volumes covers the two dynasties that controlled the region of Kastamonu and north-western Anatolia from the 13th to the 15th century. There is a clear imbalance in the length of the research when compared with the analysis that Yiicel was able to do for each of these dynasties. The section dedicated to the Chobanids occupies only a fifth of the book and the entire political, social and literary history of the dynasty is described in 50 pages. Despite the limited scope of Yiicel’s analysis of the Chobanids, this section of the book was the most exhaustive and in-depth study of the history of the dynasty up to that time and remains a crucial work for the study of 13th-century Kastamonu. Unlike Turan, Yiicel attempted to provide a more comprehensive political, economic and social analysis of the Chobanids vis-a-vis the textual evidence surviving from the period. Yiicel’s work is the first to engage in discussing the Turkmen origin of the dynasty, provides a chronological description of the deeds of Chobanid rulers and discusses the role of the dynasty as a pivotal part of the political dynamics of Seljuq and Mongol Anatolia. However, while Yiicel mentions the role of some Chobanid rulers as patrons of literature and includes transcriptions of some of the works composed in Kastamonu, he does not use these texts to add to our understanding of the social history of the period. In other words, while he mentions the rulers’ active role in financing the production of literary works, he fails to engage more deeply in the implications that the production of these particular texts had for the development of the administrative, religious and cultural history of Chobanid Kastamonu. Yiicel’s pioneering work remains, nonetheless, a reference work for the study of medieval Kastamonu and beyond, and a pivotal study from which the present study has benefited greatly.
Since Yiicel’s publication, general studies on the history of medieval Anatolia have relied on this work for referencing events occurring in 13th-century Kastamonu, and little has been added to this standard narrative.*? However, at the turn of the 21st century, a number of region-based studies appeared that began to challenge some of the ideas presented by previous research and opened new fields of research on the region’s history. Among them, the study by Dimitri Korobeinikov focusing on the specific events leading to the ‘revolt of Kastamonw’ of 1291-93 challenged some of the statements made previously by Zachariadou and gave a different dimension to the role of the Chobanids in the history of medieval Anatolia.*? Korobeinikov manages to reconcile the terminology used by Pachymeres with the Islamic accounts to reconstruct a coherent narrative of the revolt.** By using a larger spectrum of sources that include both Islamic and Byzantine accounts, Korobeinikov shifted the traditional perspective that viewed the Chobanids as marginal political actors and centred his attention on the political developments occurring in the region and the implications that this frontier had in our understanding of the history of both Islamic Anatolia and the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century. Further, Korobeinikov challenged the idea of considering the Chobanids as just another Anatolian beylik kingdom, suggesting that the characteristics of this particular dynasty set it apart from other Anatolian kingdoms that developed in the 14th century.*° A similar regional approach has been taken by Andrew Peacock in a group of articles dedicated to different aspects of the history of north-western Anatolia in the 13th century. Especially relevant for its contribution to our knowledge of the Chobanids of Kastamonu is the analysis of a particular ‘letter of victory’ (Fatihnama), in which the Chobanid ruler Muzaffar al-Din b. Alp Yiirek is said to have invaded a pair of Byzantine castles on the Bay of Gideros on the shores of the Black Sea in 1284.*° Further, different research focusing on the history of Sinop, Cide and Kastamonu as a frontier between the Seljuqs and the Byzantine Empire has contributed greatly to enhancing the historical relevance of the region in understanding the complex political arena of 13th-century Anatolia and the region of Kastamonu.*’
Finally, in recent years, Turkish scholars based in Kastamonu have also greatly enhanced the visibility of the Chobanids in Anatolian historiography. Although publishing extensively on the Jandarids as well, Cevdet Yakupoglu has contributed a great deal in the last decade to the study of different aspects of the history of Chobanid Kastamonu. Particularly relevant are his contributions to the study of patronage, endowments and religion among the Chobanids in the 13th century.** More recently, the publication of a monograph in collaboration with Namiq Musali has contributed greatly to our knowledge of insha’ literature under the Chobanids and has assisted considerably in the preparation of Chapter 6 of this book.*? However, despite this increasing interest and awareness of the relevant role that Chobanid Kastamonu played in the history of Seljuq and Mongol Anatolia, many newly published studies on the history of the period either omit this frontier region or reduce it to a marginal place in their general analysis. It is hoped that this study can counter this trend and promote further research on the contribution that local and regional history can make to our general understanding of the medieval Middle East.
The organisation of this book
This study is divided into six chapters, each presenting different aspects of the political, religious and cultural history of the Chobanid dynasty that ruled over north-western Anatolia from c. 1211 to 1309. By focusing on a number of local sources and unique manuscripts, this research offers new perspectives on the development of a local political entity in Seljuq- and Mongol-dominated Anatolia. The book makes use of the case of this local dynasty to engage in broader topics affecting the cultural development of Anatolia and the Mongoldominated Middle East. The book initially offers a section (Chapter 1) that contextualises the emergence of this dynasty within the history of the peninsula from the arrival of the first Turkish groups in the late 11th century until the removal of the Chobanids at the hands of the new dynastic order of the Jandarids at the beginning of the 14th century. Once the historical context has been presented, the following chapter (Chapter 2) looks at a variety of original sources to suggest a historical reconstruction of a chronological political history of the Chobanid dynasty, from the earlier references we have in the sources until the demise of the dynasty in the early 14th century. The chapter compares and contrasts the political trajectory of the different Chobanid rulers vis-a-vis the Byzantine Empire, the Seljuqs of Rum and the Mongols of Iran, showing how the Turkmen rulers adapted to the always-changing political circumstances of 13th-century Anatolia, while shifting political alliances in order to consolidate their control over the region. Once Chobanid rule in Kastamonu became firmly established from the 1280s onward, the way was open for its rulers to set up a political agenda that promoted the production of different Persian literary works and facilitated the construction of secular and religious buildings in the region. A survey of the literary and architectural legacy is presented in Chapter 3, aiming to evaluate aspects of patronage, production and distribution of literary works and the financing of religious and secular buildings in the urban and rural landscape of the city of Kastamonu and its surrounding region during the 13th century.
The remaining sections of the book explore aspects of socio-cultural history of the region by focusing mainly on the evidence contained in texts produced in Chobanid Kastamonu. The composition of a work based on the classical Persian Sivasatnama (Siyar al-muluk) often attributed to the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk, offers a good opportunity to investigate how culturally Persian individuals used these texts as a way to obtain economic rewards and improve their career prospects at the court (Chapter 4). The author’s alterations to the classical text to produce the new work dedicated to the Chobanid ruler is also part of the analysis of this section. The chapter suggests, by considering the arrangement of contents and chapter omissions in the new text vis-a-vis the original work, that this new composition reflects aspects of the religious, political and social history of Chobanid Kastamonu that are omitted in more traditional source material. A similar methodology of having a locally produced text at the centre of the analysis is implemented in the following section of the book (Chapter 5), which is dedicated to exploring aspects of religion under Chobanid rule. This section is based on the analysis of different unique accounts of the practices and beliefs of a group of antinomian Sufis (Qalandars) in a text dedicated to the Chobanid ruler Muzaffar al-Din b. Alp Yiirek (r. 1280-91). The chapter explores the idea of ‘orthodoxy’, included in another section of the same text, by offering a complementary view between Hanafi and Shafi‘i interpretations of Islamic law. This chapter argues that by looking at this specific text composed for a Chobanid ruler, it is possible to suggest that a debate took place at the Kastamonu court on aspects of religious matters that are completely absent from the majority of the sources available from the period. Finally, a closing section (Chapter 6) engages with a number of little-known texts composed under the cultural patronage of the Chobanid dynasty to discuss different aspects of socio-political life in 13th-century Anatolia. The main focus of this section is the genre of insha’ (chancellery letters) and the art of letter-writing that, based on the relatively high number of texts of this genre produced in this region, became especially popular in 13th-century Kastamonu. These letters, written by Husam al-Din Khu’i (d. c. 1309) and dedicated to the Chobanids, had not only a clear stylistic, but also a pedagogical, purpose that indicates an attempt to provide the Chobanid realm with a diplomatic apparatus, which suggests the Chobanids had a more elaborate conception of the state than previously assumed. This genre of letterwriting inspired the court and became popular among individuals of a literate Anatolian elite. A unique sample of personal letters produced in Kastamonu is also added to the analysis of this section as it helps to reconstruct a picture of the socio-economic conditions of north-western Anatolia in the 13th century from a personal perspective.
Overall, this book aims to offer a comprehensive explanation for the emergence and development of the Chobanid dynasty in Seljuq and Mongol Anatolia for a better understanding of the characteristics of the rule of this Turkmen dynasty, the patronage of Persian literature promoted by the court and the socio-religious transformation of this territory under their rule. We do not expect that this research will be the final word on any of the aspects developed in this book, but rather a useful contribution to the history of medieval Anatolia.
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